Morbidity and mortality analysis in general surgery operations. Is there any room for improvement?

The aim of this work is to examine the performance of surgeries, by evaluating the results. The evaluation of the results, with particular attention to complications, is the corner stone to identify the causes leading to correction of any predisposing factors and reducing risks, to improve quality of care.

We performed a retrospective analysis of 952 consecutive patients who had elective or emergency surgery from November 1, 2018, to October 31, 2019. We classified surgical intervention according to their complexity. The Clavien Dindo classification was used to categorize the complications. We performed a stepwise multivariate logistic-regression analysis, with the presence of postoperative complications as dependent variable and age, gender, BMI, ASA, type of surgery procedures, complexity of surgery, operative time as covariates.

A total of 952 surgical procedures were included in this study. Abdominal procedures were the most frequent type of surgery performed (52.1%). Postoperative complications occurred in 120 surgical procedures (12.6%), these are related to the increase of the ASA score and the longer average operative time, with an increase of developing complication of 5% for each additional 10 minutes of surgery.

Many factors influence postoperative morbidity and mortality. Particular attention was due to complication's evaluation, about all in abdominal surgery and high complexity procedures. We argue that key factors which influence the favorable surgical outcome are compliance with standardized safety procedures, volume of activity of the structure, presence of interdisciplinary care groups, and ability of health professionals in recognizing and promptly treating complications.